Thursday, April 26, 2012

Oh Canada? "The Biggest Student Uprising You've never heard of "

Dedicated to all the students in Quebec who have peacefully hit the streets to protest AUSTERITY!
I had no idea that there were so many of you protesting
As is so typical the msm is absent/downplaying and lying!
They do not want the rest of Canada aware. They do not want the rest of the world aware.
Protestors are being attacked by the Surete de Quebec. (provincial police force)
The Surete has a history of brutality. The Surete has a history of using provocateurs.

We hear endlessly about so called protestors in Syria and their government oppression. Which is bullshit.
In Canada the NATO media complies with the powers that be, therefore large protests against Austerity do not exist

On an unseasonably warm day in late March, a quarter of a million
postsecondary students and their supporters gathered in the streets of
Montreal to protest against the Liberal government’s plan to raise
tuition fees by 75% over five years. As the crowd marched in seemingly endless waves from Place du Canada, dotted with the carrés rouges,
or red squares, that have become the symbol of the Quebec student
movement, it was plainly obvious that this demonstration was the largest
in Quebec’s, and perhaps Canadian, history.

The March 22nd Manifestation nationale
was not the culmination but the midpoint of a 10-week-long student
uprising that has seen, at its height, over 300,000 college and
university students join an unlimited and superbly coordinated general strike.
As of today, almost 180,000 students remain on picket lines in
departments and faculties that have been shuttered since February, not
only in university-dense Montreal but also in smaller communities throughout Quebec.

The strike has been supported by near-daily protest actions ranging
from family-oriented rallies to building occupations and bridge
blockades, and, more recently, by a campaign of political and economic disruption
directed against government ministries, crown corporations, and private
industry. Although generally peaceful, these actions have met with
increasingly brutal acts of police violence: Student protesters are routinely beaten, pepper-sprayed, and tear-gassed by riot police, and one, Francis Grenier, lost an eye
after being hit by a flashbang grenade at close range. Meanwhile,
college and university administrators have deployed a spate of court
injunctions and other legal measures in an unsuccessful attempt to break
the strike, and Quebec’s premier, Jean Charest, remains intransigent in
spite of growing calls for his government to negotiate with student leaders.

So, why haven’t you heard about this yet?

While the Quebec student strike is comparable in scale to student
movements in Europe and Latin America, it is entirely unique in the
context of Canada and the continental United States, which makes the
absence of media coverage outside the province puzzling at best and
disturbing at worst. As the veteran Canadian activist Judy Rebick
observed in a recent rabble.ca column, “it is incredible that there has
been almost no coverage of this extraordinary uprising of young people in Quebec in English Canada,” and, save for a brief mention on Democracy Now!,
the movement has been ignored by even the independent American press. A
key factor, certainly, is language: Quebec is a predominantly
French-speaking province with a fully separate media infrastructure, and
its famously militant
student unions, which are responsible for organizing the strike,
operate largely independently of the academic and activist networks that
link the rest of the continent. In this sense, English and French
North America exist as two solitudes
in much the same way that English- and French-speaking Quebecers once
did—that is, they live in close quarters but don’t actually talk to each
other very much.

Still, language differences are no excuse for overlooking this
important student movement. Montreal, the province’s cultural capital,
is a bilingual city and student leaders have made efforts to ensure that
strike information is available on English Web sites, Facebook
groups, and Twitter feeds. Further, the English student media, based
at Montreal’s Concordia and McGill universities, have provided
consistent and often excellent coverage of the strike and related
protests. Even the national Canadian press has finally picked up the story, albeit without addressing the larger historical and political context
of the strike or its connection to the austerity measures that are
being imposed on students and workers across Canada and around the
world. More promisingly, next weekend’s Edufactory conference, The University is Ours!,
is holding a special plenary session on tuition struggles in Quebec,
which will help to raise awareness of the events that have fueled le printemps québécois.
At the very least, the student strike should serve as inspiration to
social movements far beyond Quebec’s borders, as well as an urgent call
to solidarity.

Well the media is doing a great job in portraying the students as violent spoiled brats, they are also using this to divide us via the old Quebec vs ROC thing. It's working too, if the comment sections of both CBC and the G&M are any indication. Easy peasy for the PTB to spin this given the already antagonistic relationship between Quebec and the ROC.

I was talking to a young fellow about this, he said, when they see the dudes all in black show up, everyone kind of knows they are cops, sent to whip up violence and vandalism. His friend was one of those arrested in Gatineau last week.

FORMER DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE ISRAHELLI FOREIGN MINISTRY & ONCE ISRAHELLI AMBASSADOR TO TURKEY SAYS HE MET WITH SYRIAN OPPOSITION IN ''TURKEY'' RECENTLY http://thenakedfacts.blogspot.com/2012/04/former-director-general-of-israhelli.html

Agree with you and Buffy on the dumb comments at CBC reflecting the extent to which Canadians have been dumbed down and filled with petty hate and jealousy.

As for the lack of media coverage, I believe it is simply because this is NOT a controlled opposition event.Arab springs, and Occupy clearly serve the 1% and get media "coverage". As the song says, the revolution will not be televised.

True, not for some time now on Occupy.Created and financed by the 1%, it was set up as controlled opposition and crushed last fall in a coordinated well publicized fashion. I was part of the protests and clearly most people there were good and honest, trying to do the right thing. But they/we were not in control.

The biggest takeaway from the Occupy movement was that we can't win (I don't believe that) and that the establishment will crush and hurt us. Protesting = failure.Again I don't believe that, but the media presentation of the entire Occupy cycle made that assertion.The bombardment of information about police abuse of innocent citizens, US supreme court allowing strip searches for traffic violations and such, the brutalization of NYC Occupy protesters are all designed to break our spirit.The Montreal protests are real, the spirit and emotion are real, so it is uncontrollable. That is why our media are not permitted to cover it and prefer to do damage control past tense.

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